EEG Hyperscanning to quantify neuronal synchronization and cognitive function in an educational context

The growing recognition of education’s pivotal role in society has fueled interest in the neural mechanisms underpinning learning, with the aim of improving teaching practices. EEG hyperscanning offers a powerful tool to study learning dynamics by analyzing how students’ brain activity synchronizes during different teaching strategies. However, previous studies in educational contexts are limited and lack a comprehensive framework for objectively evaluating the neural correlates of various teaching methods. To address this gap, we introduce a novel hyperscanning framework that integrates brain synchronization analysis with cognitive indices to quantitatively assess key brain functions in education across different teaching styles. Our findings show that cognitive indices derived directly from brain activity align with self-reported ratings from previous studies, highlighting their reliability as objective tools for evaluating cognitive states in educational settings. Moreover, by leveraging a spectral inter-brain synchronization metric including information derived from the cognitive indices, we quantified the extent to which cognitive functions are shared among students. We found that higher inter-brain synchronization indicates students are sharing collective cognitive patterns, supporting the crucial role of shared attention in shaping group learning dynamics. These findings underscore EEG hyperscanning’s potential as a quantitative tool for evaluating and enhancing educational strategies.